Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Parenting Reading for Back to School

Labor Day has always been my New Year’s. A fresh page in a marbled composition book. Sharpened pencils, metaphorical and actual. A fresh start with a sharpened mind.

Illustration by Barry Falls

To begin, some reading. The last few days have brought a trove of good reporting and writing about parenting, in print and around the Web.

To start, there’s this article on the front page of today’s New York Times by Jenny Anderson, and it starts with a math problem:

There are 62 kindergarten seats at the Trinity School this fall, and 756 children wanted them. What percentage made the cut?

Not so fast, she continues:

The answer seems straightforward: 8.2 percent. But private-school admissions are hardly straightforward.
Of those 62 spots at Trinity, one of New York’s most competitive schools, 33 were taken first by qualified siblings of Trinity students. An additional 11 went to children of alumni, who also get a leg up in the process, and one more belongs to the child of a staff member. That left 17 spaces for families with no ties to Trinity, giving those without connections a 2.4 percent shot at the prize.

She goes on to explain that the city’s private schools are beginning to rethink this kind of math, and re-evaluate the obligation of a school to a student’s sibling. The reason? You knew that answer, didn’t you? The economy:

Broadly speaking, the schools want to take siblings and legacies, both because it makes life easier for families and because it deepens relationships, which many believe results in long-term generosity. But as schools look to bolster endowments amid the poor economy, some have begun to question that approach.

Earlier in the weekend, also on The Times’s front page, there was this by Jacqueline Mroz about some very, umm, productive sperm donors, and how their offspring are using the Internet to find one another.

She writes:

Cynthia Daily and her partner used a sperm donor to conceive a baby seven years ago, and they hoped that one day their son would get to know some of his half siblings, an extended family of sorts for modern times.

So Ms. Daily searched a Web-based registry for other children fathered by the same donor and helped to create an online group to track them. Over the years, she watched the number of children in her son’s group grow.

And grow.

Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. “It’s wild when we see them all together: they all look alike,” said Ms. Daily, 48, a social worker in the Washington area who sometimes vacations with other families in her son’s group.

Wild, yes. And, some say, a problem:

Now, there is growing concern among parents, donors and medical experts about potential negative consequences of having so many children fathered by the same donors, including the possibility that genes for rare diseases could be spread more widely through the population. Some experts are even calling attention to the increased odds of accidental incest between half sisters and half brothers, who often live close to one another.

“My daughter knows her donor’s number for this very reason,” said the mother of a teenager conceived via sperm donation in California who asked that her name be withheld to protect her daughter’s privacy. “She’s been in school with numerous kids who were born through donors. She’s had crushes on boys who are donor children. It’s become part of sex education” for her.

Critics say that fertility clinics and sperm banks are earning huge profits by allowing too many children to be conceived with sperm from popular donors, and that families should be given more information on the health of donors and the children conceived with their sperm. They are also calling for legal limits on the number of children conceived using the same donor’s sperm and a re-examination of the anonymity that cloaks many donors.

“We have more rules that go into place when you buy a used car than when you buy sperm,” said Debora L. Spar, president of Barnard College and author of “The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.” “It’s very clear that the dealer can’t sell you a lemon, and there’s information about the history of the car. There are no such rules in the fertility industry right now.”

The other selections that caught my attention over the last few days were personal essays about parenting.

As part of “The Baby Project” series on NPR, Barrie Hardymon, an editor for “Talk of the Nation,” wrote “I Had a C-Section and I Loved It.” She offered her view as a counterpoint to most of the birth articles she reads out there. “Birth has become so politicized,” she wrote in her introduction, “that it’s not O.K. to even intimate that you had a scheduled C-section.”

She goes well beyond intimation, as the title of her piece suggests:

For the most part, when I entered these conversations with the wonderful women who offered me advice and support, I felt gratitude. But rarely did I identify with the birthing choices that were the norm for some of my dearest friends. How, I thought as I tucked my yoga mat in the back of the closet where it still sits, was I going to get this baby out of me? At a party, a woman I’d just met asked me what my “dream delivery” was. I mentioned the much maligned “twilight sleep” in “Mad Men.” It seemed perfect to me (minus, maybe, the enema): Go to sleep, wake up not pregnant, baby in arms. I received the same appalled look from her that I’d gotten at the yoga studio.

“Don’t you care about your birth experience?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I guess not. I care about the baby experience.”

She sniffed and told me that both her children were born without intervention. Intervention! I was dying to have someone intervene (as soon as possible) and get this child into the world with a minimum of fuss. I was clearly destined for at least an epidural, and if there was any way I could get Betty Draper’s drugs, I’d be thrilled.

As it turns out (pun intended?) her son, Hank, provided that option:

And then, at 33 weeks, my doctor had news for me. The baby was breech. Although I was obviously worried about any risks this might create for him, I had to admit that for me it was occasion for enormous relief. I scheduled my C-section right away.

On my BabyCenter “mommy boards,” other women reassured me that the baby might turn, and that there were things I could do to help the process along. “That’s O.K.,” I wrote. “I’m O.K. with Caesarean.” Others told me to try to have the baby vaginally anyway — women had been doing this for thousands of years without medical intervention. Hmm. You know what I bet those women would have liked, as they clutched at twisted bedsheets and screamed for hour upon hour, only to, in some tragic cases, have a baby get stuck in the birth canal? A C-section.

One woman went so far as to say that I was selfish not to even try to turn the baby. “Some babies are breech because they feel their mother’s ambivalence. Motherhood,” she wrote, “isn’t supposed to be easy.” Her signature read, “hippie, feminist, home birthing, working mom!” This was really confusing. You mean, we’re supposed to start martyring ourselves even before the baby is born? We’re still mad at Eve for eating that apple?

Worse, I thought, we’re mad at one another. For every woman that whispered a recipe for ginger tea, there was one ready to tell me I was already failing at motherhood — before the baby was even born. I couldn’t even get him into the world properly. How would I ever get him to college?

On a dramatically different topic, Daphne Wysham spent Labor Day weekend purposefully getting arrested, then writing about it. Wysham, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, and host of Earthbeat Radio, participated in the protests in front of the White House against the Keystone XL pipeline.

Though she spends her career worrying about the ruination of the planet, she has always tried to shield her 11-year-old son from the worst of her fears. “It’s more important to let a child be a child,” she writes. “Let them experience the wonder and beauty of nature, not fear it.”

What though, to say, when Mom heads off to the White House to be arrested? For that she turned to pop culture:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, my son and watched the movie “Avatar” on DVD (for the nth time). As it ended, I thought: This might be a good opportunity to explain my plans for that week.
“You know, this movie is very close to what’s happening in Canada right now,” I explained. “And it’s one reason I’ll be getting arrested this week.”

As my son took in my explanation for my planned act of civil disobedience, he quickly concluded that he, too, wanted to be arrested. But after some hours of contemplation, I had to reluctantly tell him no.

Why “reluctantly”? Because I thought I was denying my son the right to act, politically, on an issue that would very likely have a much larger impact on his life than on mine. He, far more than the adults who were weighing in, should have a vote on this issue. Yet he, and all our children, have little say on the world they’ll inherit, one that may be changed utterly, in ways we can’t even comprehend.

It was not her own son, however, whose name she invoked at the actual moment she was handcuffed. It was someone else’s children:

… I recalled the day Obama stood before the American people, in those days and months as BP’s deepwater well billowed millions of barrels of oil from that horrifying wound in the Gulf of Mexico floor. I remembered him remarking that, yes, he was very concerned about the spill because, while he shaved one morning, his 11-year-old daughter Malia had asked him, “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?”

Children have a way of speaking to our hearts. And so, I mused, even if President Obama didn’t hear the songs and the chants of the more than 1,000 people who were arrested over the course of two weeks, even if the prayers of religious leaders and Native American elders went unanswered, even if he didn’t read the editorial opposing the Keystone XL pipeline in The New York Times, even if he ignored the advice of his very own EPA, perhaps, in this instance, Sasha or Malia might see us outside the White House gates, and ask him, “Did you stop the pipeline yet, Daddy?”

As the police handcuffed my hands behind me and led me off to a white school bus, I shouted: “For Sasha and Malia!”

And, finally, a story of another child, and the small corner of the world that is his inheritance. Tom Fields-Meyer is the author of the wonderful book “Following Ezra: What One Father Learned About Gumby, Otters, Autism, and Love From His Extraordinary Son.” And today, on the first day of school, The Wall Street Journal posted an excerpt.

Ezra will be starting 10th grade, and in the essay, his father recalls the day years ago when he first realized his son was different:

I can still picture the knee-high Formica table, still recall the awkward effort to fold my adult body into the toddler-size plastic chair. I remember the drive that morning from work, how I was wondering what the point was of parent-teacher conferences at a preschool. What could the instructor possibly tell us about our son, who wasn’t yet 3? How he was interacting with his Play-Doh?

“Let’s start with the positives,” the teacher told my wife and me haltingly. “Ezra has a lot of energy, and he’s a very loving child.”

I waited for more positives. None came. Instead, I heard how my son was spending his mornings idly flipping through picture books, oblivious to the other boys and girls. And how when the children lined up to wash their hands before snack, he would stand at the sink, staring blankly into space, frozen. A few adjectives stood out: spacey, inflexible, autonomous.

Eventually there would be other descriptors, including “high-functioning autism” and a journey to “learn to be the right parent for Ezra.”

I figured that was just a phase, or a reflection of his quirky personality, until a therapist we consulted, attempting to reassure us by explaining that we were not to blame, mentioned something about his “wiring.” Wiring, I thought. That doesn’t sound like a phase.

Not long after that, during a session where my wife expressed tearful frustration and we both felt exasperated that our attempts at play therapy seemed so futile, the same counselor made a suggestion: “You need to let yourselves grieve.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For the child he didn’t turn out to be.”

Lying sleepless that night, I realized something: I had no instinct to mourn. I had carried no conscious notion of what my children would be like — boys or girls, tall or short, conventional or a bit odd. I planned only to love them.

Learning to be the best parent a particular child needs; that’s a journey each of us embarks on anew this time of year. I wish each of you a smooth and fulfilling one.

About

We're all living the family dynamic, as parents, as children, as siblings, uncles and aunts. At Motherlode, lead writer and editor KJ Dell’Antonia invites contributors and commenters to explore how our families affect our lives, and how the news affects our families—and all families. Join us to talk about education, child care, mealtime, sports, technology, the work-family balance and much more